(1) Disney has optioned the movie rights to Ursula Vernon’s childrens book Castle Hangnail for an adaptation to be produced by Ellen DeGeneres.
DeGeneres will produce with Jeff Kleeman, her partner at A Very Good Production banner.
The book tells of a 12-year old witch who shows up at a dark castle that needs a master or be decommissioned by the bureaucratic Board of Magic and its many minions, such as a hypochondriac fish and a letter ‘Q’ averse minotaur, dispersed into the world. She projects confidence as she tackles the series of tasks laid forth by the board but underneath lie several simmering secrets, including one of her being an imposter….
DeGeneres and Kleeman are busy in the television world but Hangnail is their second notable move on the movie side and keeps their feet firmly in the fantasy field. Earlier this year the duo set up Uprooted, the novel from Temeraire author Naomi Novik, for Warner Bros.
(2) A magisterial essay by Ursula K. Le Guin at Tin House, “’Where Do You Get Your Ideas From?’”.
American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.
What American critics and teachers call “literature” is still almost wholly restricted to realism. All other forms of fiction—westerns, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, romance, historical, regional, you name it—are dismissed as “genre.” Sent to the ghetto. That the ghetto is about twelve times larger than the city, and currently a great deal livelier, doesn’t bother those who live in ivory towers. Magic realism, though—that does bother them; they hear Gabriel García Márquez gnawing quietly at the foundations of the ivory tower, they hear all these crazy Indians dancing up in the attic, and they think maybe they should do something about it. Perhaps they should give that fellow who teaches the science fiction course tenure? Oh, surely not.
To say that realistic fiction is by definition superior to imaginative fiction is to imply that imitation is superior to invention. I have wondered if this unstated but widely accepted (and, incidentally, very puritanical) proposition is related to the recent popularity of the memoir and the personal essay. This has been a genuine popularity, not a matter of academic canonizing. People really do want to read memoir and personal essay, and writers want to write it. I’ve felt rather out of step. I like history and biography fine, but when family and personal memoir seems to be the most popular—the dominant narrative form—well, I have searched my soul for prejudice and found it. I prefer invention to imitation. I love novels. I love made-up stuff.
(3) “The Call of the Sad Whelkfins: The Continued Relevance of How To Suppress Women’s Writing“ by Annalee Flower Horne and Natalie Luhrs in Uncanny Magazine #7 uses Joanna Russ’ text to diagnose some critics’ responses to Ancillary Justice.
I snorted. For the past week, Natalie Luhrs and I had been discussing the book in the context of the ongoing fight for the soul of the science fiction community, most recently played out in the failed attempt to take over the Hugo Awards. In HTSWW, Russ uses an alien species called the “whelk–finned Glotolog” to illustrate the methods by which human cultures control women’s writing without direct censorship (4). These days, the tactics the so–called “sad puppies” use to paint themselves as the true heirs of science fiction, bravely holding the line against the invading masses, are the very same tactics Joanna Russ ascribed to the whelk–finned Glotolog in 1983…
False Categorizing of the Work She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist, and it isn’t really art. (HTSWW)
False Categorization is, essentially, bad faith. It allows the critic to shift the focus to something else—usually something trivial in the larger context, so as to dismiss the whole. So once again, we’ll look at the pronouns in Ancillary Justice. By focusing on the pronouns, the sad whelkfins are able to dismiss the entire work as nothing more than a political screed against men, as turgid message fiction that doesn’t even tell a good story.
That’s a massive tell to anyone who has actually read the book—because while the pronouns do take some adjustment, they’re a small part of the novel’s world–building and not a major source of plot or conflict. They just are, the way there is air to breathe and skel to eat.
(4) “Updates on the Chinese Nebula Awards and the Coordinates Awards” at Amazing Stories has the full list of award winners (only two were reported here on the night of the ceremony). Since Steve Davidson is able to reproduce the titles in the original language, all the more reason to refer you there.
(5) Liu Cixin participated in “The Future of China through Chinese Science Fiction” at the University of Sydney on November 3.
A full house of 500 for @liu_cixin @Sydney_Ideas tonight – a rare privilege to have @HugoAwards winner @Sydney_Uni pic.twitter.com/Xu3k70WxqP
— Sydney Ideas (@Sydney_Ideas) November 3, 2015
(6) Crossed Genres Magazine will close after the December 2015 issue reports Locus Online.
Co-publisher Bart Lieb posted a statement:
Two primary factors led to this decision. First, one of Crossed Genres’ co-publishers, Kay Holt, has been dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) for more than two years. It’s made it extremely difficult for her to help with the running of CG, leaving the lion’s share of responsibilities on the other co-publisher, Bart Leib, who’s also working a day job. Magazine co-editor Kelly Jennings, ebook coordinator Casey Seda, and our team of first readers have all been heroic in their volunteer efforts, but we’ve still been unable to keep from falling behind.
The second factor is simply that the magazine has run out of funds to continue. In April 2014 we ran a successful Kickstarter to keep CG Magazine going, but once another year had passed, roughly 90 percent of those who’d pledged to the Kickstarter chose not to renew their memberships….
(7) Today In History
- November 3, 1956 — On this night in 1956, CBS presented the first broadcast of The Wizard of Oz. It was a major event for which the network paid MGM a quarter of a million dollars for the rights (over $2,000,000 in today’s dollars.)
- November 3, 1976 — Brian De Palma’s Carrie is seen for the very first time
(8) Today’s Birthday Monster
- November 3, 1954 — Godzilla was released in Japanese theaters.
(9) Today’s Belated Birthday
- Lovecraft’s 125th birthday (in August) was celebrated in many ways in Providence. A new plaque was installed near his birthplace at 454 Angell Street, designed, created, and installed by Gage Prentiss.
(10) Today’s Yodeling Marmot
- “Marmot Sings Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria”, courtesy of Will R. (Translation: I’m not taking the blame for this one!)
(11) “Transparent Aluminum: IT’S REAL!” at Treehugger.
Remember Star Trek: The Voyage Home, where Scotty talks into a computer mouse and then instantly figures out keyboards and gives away the formula for transparent Aluminum? And remember Galaxy Quest, where Commander Taggart tells the Justin Long character about the ship: “IT’S REAL!”
Mash those two scenes together and you have Spinel, described by US Naval Research Laboratory scientist Dr. Jas Sanghera as “actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate. The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments—so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.” He likes it for the same reason Scotty did, according to an NRL press release
(12) Arlan Andrews told Facebook friends that Ken Burnside has answered the Alfies.
So, today I received this 3D-printed crashed rocket ship, titled “The Wreck of the Hugo” as created by artist Charles Oines and commissioned by Ken Burnside. Others went to Kary English, Mike Resnick, and Toni Weisskopf. According to Ken Burnside, the official 2015 Hugo voting tallies showed each of us recipients as runners-up to the 2500-vote NO AWARD bloc that wrecked the Hugos this year in many categories. I gratefully accept the gifted award in the spirit in which it was given, and sincerely hope that no future Hugo nominees are ever again voted off the island in such a fashion.
(That last part resonates strangely, at least in my memory, because “I accept this award in the spirit in which it is given” was Norman Spinrad’s answer when handed the Brown Hole Award for Outstanding Professionalism in 1973. And he was right to be suspicious.)
(13) Meanwhile, the curator of the Alfies, George R.R. Martin, is already making recommendations for the Dramatic Presentation categories in “Hugo Thoughts”.
In the past, I have usually made my own Hugo recommendations only after nominations have opened. But in light of what happened last year, it seems useful to begin much sooner. To get talking about the things we like, the things we don’t like. This is especially useful in the case of the lesser known and obscure work. Drawing attention to such earlier in the process is the best way to get more fans looking at them… and unless you are aware of a work, you’re not likely to nominate it, are you? (Well, unless you’re voting a slate, and just ticking off boxes).
Let me start with the Dramatic Presentation category. Long form….
(14) Damien G. Walter does best when the target is as easy to hit as the broad side of a barn. “Gus. A Case Study In Sad Puppy Ignorance”.
Firstly, is Gus actually asking us to believe that Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the famed early feminist icon, daughter of philosopher and political activist Mary Wollstonecraft, wife of romantic poet and political radical Percy Byshe Shelley, close friend of paramilitary revolutionary Lord Byron, and author of seven novels (many science fictional) and innumerable other stories, essays and letters, all of them revealing a life of deep engagement with political and social issues of gender, class, sexuality and more, that this same Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein : A Modern Prometheus (a subtitle explicitly invoking the mythical act of stealing fire from the gods as an opening rhetorical reference to the risks of scientific endeavour) as, and I quote, “the sole purpose of…macabre entertainment”? Because I would suggest, on the basis of all available evidence, including every single thing ever written about Frankenstein, that Gus is in a minority on this one. In fact, I will go so far as to say that he is utterly, absurdly and idiotically wrong.
(15) John Thiel’s responses to Steve Davidson’s queries about “trufandom” appear in “The Voices of Fandom” at Amazing Stories.
Steve’s introduction notes –
I posed a series of interview questions to members of the Fan History group on Facebook. I thought it would be a good place to start because that group is made up entirely of Trufans.
Today, I present the first in a series of responses to those questions and I should point out that, in typical Fannish fashion, the answers are anything but monolithic. Apparently Fans have as many different ideas about what it means to be a Fan as there are Fans, which just serves to point out how difficult it is to get a handle on this question.
(16) A video interview with Dame Diana Rigg.
Five decades since she first appeared as Emma Peel in The Avengers (1961-1969), fans of the show still approach Dame Diana Rigg to express their gratitude. Rigg joins BFI curator Dick Fiddy to reflect on the influence of Peel on real-life women and acting with Patrick Macnee and Ian Hendry.
(17) Jon Michaud reviews Michael Witwer’s Empire of Imagination: Gary Gygax and the Birth of Dungeons & Dragons in The New Yorker and accuses the biographer of shielding Gygax rather than exploring more deeply the controversial topic of his religious views.
Dr. Thomas Radecki, a founding member of the National Coalition on TV Violence, said, “There is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons & Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others.” In her book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” Tipper Gore connected the game to satanism and the occult. All of this prompted a “60 Minutes” segment in which Gygax rejected these myriad accusations, calling them “nothing but a witch hunt.”
What was largely unknown or omitted from this brouhaha is that Gygax was an intermittently observant Jehovah’s Witness. This startling fact crops up about halfway through Witwer’s biography, when he notes that Gygax’s “controversial” game, along with his smoking and drinking, had led to a parting of the ways with the local congregation. Up until that point, the matter of Gygax’s faith had gone unmentioned in the biography, and it is barely discussed thereafter. (The book’s index does not have an entry for “Jehovah’s Witness” or “Gygax, Gary—religious beliefs.”) Given the furor that D. & D. caused, the absence of a deeper analysis of Gygax’s faith is a glaring omission. In a recent interview with Tobias Carroll, Witwer acknowledged that Gygax “was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. He would go door-to-door and he would give out pamphlets. He was pretty outspoken about it, as a matter of fact.” The reason for almost completely excluding it from the biography, Witwer says, is that “I couldn’t find it [as] a huge driving force in his life.…I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed with that, because I’m not clear that, especially with his gaming work and even his home life, how big a factor that was on a day-to-day basis. But I do know he was practicing.”
(18) Galactic Journey visits the year 1960 where young Mike Glyer’s favorite TV series, Men Into Space, is still on the air, and there’s even a tie-in novel by Murray Leinster.
“Men Into Space” consists of short stories following the career of Space Force officer Ed McCauley:
As a lieutenant, McCauley makes the first manned rocket flight.
As a captain, McCauley deals with an injured crewman while piloting the first space-plane.
As a major, McCauley deals with a potentially-fatal construction accident while in charge the building of the first space station.
As a colonel, McCauley deals with a murderous personnel problem while overseeing the establishment of a series of radio relays to the moon’s far side, then deals with a technical problem aboard a rocket to Venus, and another personnel problem on a Mars mission.
Lots of nuts and bolts details about ballistics, rocket fuels, radiation, the van Allen belts, and so forth. And with each story, McCauley deals with progressively more complex human problems as he moves up in rank.
Although 7-year-old me would have loved the tie-in novel, 35 cents would have been a king’s ransom in my personal economy….
(19) Here’s a photo of the Cosmos Award presentation to Neil deGrasse Tyson at the Planetary Society 35th anniversary celebration on October 24.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (left) accepted The Planetary Society’s Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation of Science. Bill Nye (middle) was on stage as Tyson accepted the award from Nichelle Nichols (right), who is best known for playing Lt. Uhura on “Star Trek” (the original series) and who is an advocate for real-world space exploration.
Before the award was given to Tyson, Nye reminisced about meeting Tyson through the organization. Nye then showed a photo of what Tyson looked like in 1980, when he was a wrestler (Tyson wrestled in high school and college), and Tyson joked that he kicked some serious butt.
Tyson had come prepared, and showed a photo of Nye in 1980, in a “Coneheads” costume, with a silver ring around his head.
(20) The Red Bull Music Academy website has published David Keenan’s “Reality Is For People Who Can’t Handle Science Fiction”, about the influence of SF on French progressive rock from 1969 through 1985.
In 2014 I interviewed Richard Pinhas of Heldon, still one of the central punk/prog mutants to come out of the French underground. I asked him about the influence of the visionary science fiction writer Philip K. Dick on his sound and on his worldview. “Philip K. Dick was a prophet to us,” Pinhas explained. “He saw the future.”
It makes sense that a musical and cultural moment that was obsessed with the sound of tomorrow would name a sci-fi writer as its central avatar. Indeed, while the Sex Pistols spat on the British vision of the future dream as a shopping scheme, the French underground projected it off the planet altogether.
When Pinhas formed Heldon in 1974 he named the group in tribute to sci-fi writer Norman Spinrad’s 1972 novel The Iron Dream, conflating his own vision of a mutant amalgam of Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock and cyborg-styled electronics with Spinrad’s re-writing of history.
(21) At CNN, “Art transforms travel photos with paper cutouts”:
That’s what happened when Londoner Rich McCor began adorning pictures of British landmarks with whimsical paper cutouts and posting the results online.
Originally, the 28-year-old creative agency worker intended the photos for the amusement of himself and friends.
Then he got a lesson on the impact of “viral” when Britain’s “Daily Mail” publicized some of his photos.
[Thanks to Rob Thornton, Mark-kitteh, Will R., Michael J. Walsh, JJ, Janice Gelb, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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(1) Congratulations to Ursula Vernon! Wow!
May I be the fifth to congratulate Red Wombat.
(12) In some of the communities I hang out with there has been a *lot* of discussion of 3D printers.
At the moment the tech overall is pretty crude. Gorgeous, professionally prepared examples dazzle, but most of the work is jaggy and pixelated. The relatively low-res printing looks terrible on the micro scale unless one pops for the insanely expensive luxury printings.
The plastic used often prints porous and rough-looking. It tends to be spongy and absorbent and is extraordinarily difficult to paint well. There are already aftermarket products, glues and epoxy resins and fillers and varnishes, with which to harden and seal and smooth out and fill in pits and roughness in the print before painting, which suggests that the technology is not yet mature.
This award, I’m sorry to say, shows the drawbacks of 3D printing. You can readily see the striations from the printer, the surface looks rough and strangely velourlike and the paint job is crude and basic. It does not look like an award that much craft or care was put into.
3D printing shows to best effect in the production of complex shapes. Something as simple as this might have worked better as handcrafted items.
Given the traditions of dimensional SF art, Sculpey or Fimo would probably have turned out more charming and more personal and been faster to produce to boot.
(12) That “Wreck of the Hugos” piece looks to me like toilet humor, which is not at all my sort of thing. It seems to be trying to suggest a penis or a turd. I’m not into visual or verbal jokes about either thing. (Fart jokes also do nothing for me.)
(16) Thanks for posting that interview with Diana Rigg! I really enjoyed that.
Laura Resnick: I haven’t read [Ancillary Justice]. (I read a few chapters, didn’t feel engaged, and never got around to picking it up again.)
You know, it’s really hard to respond to this grievous insult with “Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!” because I’ve met your parents, and they’re really nice. So I guess I’ll have to settle for “I fart in your general direction.” 😉
re: Knighton. I remember people saying moderately positive things about his essay, though I read about two pages of it before concluding that it was probably accurate but crushingly dull and capable of inducing dangerous flashbacks to the physics degree I dropped out of.
Were people just being kind/comparing it to the MZW monstrosity, or did I miss something?
Or plaster, you know. There are wonderful products that create a plastic mold of a solid object which you can then use to pour plaster in, or use clay on, and so on and so forth.
But when was the film about him first shown?
@NickPheas
Knighton? Do you mean Burnside? If so the essay was just meh to me. But then again, I’m the kind of reader that skips past Weber’s description of momentum and inertia and what not in space battles and Weir’s descriptions of various calculations.
Burnside himself, from his comments and posts, was simply a highly opportunistic individual (i.e. his priority wrt the Hugo nominations was to get more readers)
@James
Heh.
Leckie’s stroke of genius was not the use of a language without gendered pronouns – it was the use of the female pronouns in English to convey that. And you have to give it to her, that was wonderfully cheeky. She did it because if she had used “he” or nobody would have realised that something funny was going on, and she couldn’t use “it” because that would have stopped her using it for the ships. BUT, it still was a stroke of genius, it still was cheeky, and it still drove all the people who have a problem with women being half the race and not a minority up the walls, for very good reasons.
I mean, do not damn Leckie with faint praise: there is a very good reason the Puppie hate her, and it is that she is smart, subtle, and perfectly capable of conducting a mind-exploding linguistic flourish with her left hand while carrying on a full scale space opera duel with her right one.
I almost certainly do. The one about thermodynamic realism in space battles.
@ Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
“BUT, it still was a stroke of genius, it still was cheeky, and it still drove all the people who have a problem with women being half the race and not a minority up the walls, for very good reasons.”
Bingo, but so is your whole comment.
Congrats to RedWombat!
@Kendall:
I quite enjoyed both “Golden Age” books and would like to see a third. It’s been a while since I’ve read them, but I remember them being good “realistic supers” fiction. That is, once you accept superpowers as a real thing, the books do a good job of portraying how they would realistically affect people and the world.
Crossed Genres is closing their doors? This makes me sad. I *just* received their anthology Long Hidden yesterday. Beautiful work. Before I ordered it I had never even heard of Crossed Genres. Guess I’ll order a few more titles while I still can.
🙁
> “Any comments or recommendations for/against these?”
I’ve heard some good things about Wonders of the Invisible World, but have not read it myself. Willful Machines is new to me with your comment. 🙂
I have read Carrie Vaughn’s Golden Age books. I consider them her best work. I actually read a lot of Vaughn and she generally writes what I might call good beach reads — fun books with action and likable characters, but not stuff you’re going to think of as Best Book Of The Year. The Golden Age books struck me as being a cut above her usual, moving up from “fun but not more than that” to “hey, that was quite good, actually”. So I’d recommend them.
Congratulations to Red Wombat.
I hope it does get made, my kids will be over the moon to see it.
No, but Becky Chambers is eligible for the Campbell. Which seems more fitting anyway, what with the book being enjoyable but not quite up there with Heinlein and Scalzi.
@ JJ:
So do my foster kittens. And the potency of it could kill a strong dinosaur, my love.
@Laura
So I see you’re setting up a Flatulent Kitten counter movement eh….
1) Congratulations RedWombat!
3) I thought Call of the Sad Whelkfins pretty much hit the nail on the head. Although my impression is that the Puppies don’t mind the occasional woman/minority around as a sort of mascot but when women/minorities are most of the people getting recognition Puppies believe Puppies are being discriminated against. However I had no idea that How To Suppress Women’s Writing was longer than the 1 page summary I see occasionally as an internet meme. I should try to get hold of that.
11) Spinel has been around a long time, being a naturally occurring crystal / gemstone (IIRC, The Black Prince’s Ruby is actually a spinel.) Like ruby, it has a high hardness; if you can grow it to order I expect you could make pretty tough windows out of it and that’s cool. But just as you can sprinkle a bit of salt on your food without being set on fire by sodium and bleached by chlorine, all kinds of compounds contain aluminum without acting like aluminum to the point where you can refer to them by the same name. I get that Treehugger was trying to be cute but it didn’t work for me.
12) A self-crumpled dream of glory lying in Puppy poop. Very appropriate for the Puppies. All this Oh Poor Us! stuff is somehow not leading me to reconsider the use of No Award.
17) I never got the whole panic about D&D. I certainly don’t get why people think Gygax’s religion entered into it. I mean, yeah, “only clerics/druids have access to healing magic” thing but that’s pretty generic, isn’t it?
Dr. Science, I finished “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet.” Is it Hugo-eligible this year? I sense not, but I’m uncertain.
I think it was published in 2014. (And, in my mind, it’s not QUITE strong enough to be a Hugo book; I have ten novels on my longlist now and this one would rank as #11.) However, that said, I believe Chambers *is* eligible for the Campbell, and Angry Planet is certainly an exceptionally strong first novel. Chambers will be on my Campbell ballot unless I find four other new authors that completely blow me away. (Graydon Saunders, you’re on my Campbell ballot no matter what. And if you’re not eligible, too bad; I’ll let the administrators worry about that. Eustace!)
Congratulations Red Wombat!
::god stalk::
I haven’t read the Gygax bio yet and need to. But just knowing what I know of Gygax’s personal and creative life, Witwer may have a point. There doesn’t seem to be an obvious line between Gygax’s faith and his output or accomplishments. Maybe you could argue that the obstinacy one learns soliciting door-to-door for a scorned minority religion is exactly the sort of thing you need to found a new industry*, but that argument is a bit…ingenious. OTOH, maybe there really is something there somewhere and Witwer just isn’t a strong enough critic to tease it out. Still, the reviewer is accusing Witwer of deliberate bad faith, and that seems tendentious.
*Fight me. The minis wargame scene that birthed RPGs was a beautiful thing, but an “industry” it was not.
I have read Frankenstein. Pretty sure Gus has watched the movie instead.
I always thought it was a story about how not to parent . . . the kid’s physically unattractive, run away and pretend it’s not ~your~ kid..
I mean Adam is intelligent, sensitive and butt ugly. The real monster of the piece is Victor, who abandons his creation because of the fact Adam is not attractive.
If that is simply macabre entertainment, I’m astonished at the depth of mere macabre entertainment.
Everything bad that happens stems from the fact humans are not good at dealing with someone outside of cultural definitions of attractive, and rather than accompanying his creation and easing his way into humanity, Victor is disappointed he did not achieve perfection and leaves Adam to be rejected by everyone who sees him. No, message there, nope, nope.
I’m still going with Gus only ever saw the movie(s)
@ Doctor Science
re: A Long Way…
Agree with your impressions of the novel. It’s good, but not quite in Hugo territory. I liked the characters and the world-building and the story was good, but it lacked something…focus or enough tension or something. [sigh] An incisive reviewer I ain’t. :-9
I would go on another trip to that world, though. Becky Chambers looks to have potential. As others have mentioned, she’s eligible for the Campbell and is on my long list.
Leaving shortly for WFC (obligated to help in the Art Show to return the help given us last year). Anyone else going?
Congrats, Ursula! Wonderful news!
Cat:
If you mean this, it’s the cover of the book. Which makes for excellent thoughtful reading all on its own. Or a really angry poem. People should read it in school.
But I see the actual book is in print now. Yay!
Aargh. Premature sending. I meant to link a large readable picture of that cover, like so.
And to congratulate Red Wombat (yay!) and thank Mike for a great round up, especially the Le Guin. Thanks!
Well, I haven’t intended to read the Gygax bio anyway.
But as a mere consumer of his products, I don’t see what his religion has to do with them. I mean, it’s a game, what’s it got to do with “important” stuff like religion or real life?
Not to argue that the whole thing did not get away from him and become an industry, which it certainly did… but still bemused by the idea there is anything to do with religion in it. Just stories and play-acting…
The contemporaneous accusations of satanism et al were just unbelievable nonsense, but then similar happened years later for Rowling… it’s just stories, why does anyone think it could possibly have anything to do with religion! Over-boggled.
Where’s Meredith with her
scurrilous attempts to empty my bank account, why I oughta…roundup of reduced books on Kindle today?One I saw and don’t know if it’s a reduced price or not, but either way it’s a remarkably reasonable price for a just released novel is Adam Christopher’s Made To Kill. £2.99, which is pretty darn cheap.
Done both. Movie first. Did not get anything like Gus’s reading even from the movie.
Congratulations Ursula!
Burnside´s company makes very nice models, this award looks like a turd
in comparison. I will say that I find it hilarious that JCW didn’t even qualify for the No Award award, maybe Burnside is a Morlock too?Don’t forget to vote in the semi-final round of the live-action television bracket! We’re down to the Final Four and they’re all heavy-weights! Modern classic versus classic classic, story arc versus episodic, all groundbreaking in their own ways! Tough choices all!
Nothing of especial interest in Amazon UK ebook sales today. The tiniest of discounts on The Bazaar of Bad Dreams by Stephen King and Truthwitch by Susan Dennard, both Hugo-eligible, but frankly 8-15% discounts aren’t terribly exciting.
(1) Congratulations Ursula!
(3) Much better than the response article! A decent analysis of some of the ways the Ancillary books have been dismissed.
(6) Shame to lose a venue – there doesn’t seem to be any 2015 work available on Amazon UK? Or am I being stupid?
(8) The Godzilla films were formative for me. We had a bunch of them recorded off the television and I watched them over and over, slightly cheesy dubbing and all. 🙂
(10) That’s one talented Marmot. 😉
(12) I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, what a great idea! A consolation prize for those who came first after No Award! That’s really nice. On the other hand, the form it takes seems to be made out of bitterness and sadness. Contrast it with the Alfie awards which were visually still a celebration; a crashed ship is not a celebration of anything. It doesn’t say, well, you didn’t get the Hugo but have this awesome shiny thing. It feels like a missed opportunity.
Were I one of the recipients, I would be suspicious of the spirit in which it was given. I don’t think it would match mine.
(13) Always good to see more Hugo discussion! (So long as ‘slates’ or ‘voting for things you haven’t read’ aren’t involved.)
(14) This feels a bit pointless, really. A reply to a minor Puppy supporter about a silly opinion of a classic. Lots of people have silly opinions about classics. For example, lots of people think Jane Austen wrote grand romances when she was really writing cynical and bitingly funny take-downs of the culture she lived in. 😉
(18) Is Men Into Space still worth watching or has it been hit by the Suck Fairy? I don’t think I’d heard of it before the live-action television bracket.
(21) I like these! Nice approach to tourist photos.
@Mike Glyer
Particularly good round-up today!
Lurker in the Dark:
Well, when you come right down to it, all western religion is technically “just stories” (from a certain point of view) that the faithful choose to believe in, and religions have always been pretty down on competing variants, much less actual contradictory tales.
Congratulations on the movie option, Ursula! I really hope they make they movie, and do it well.
(It was nice seeing you at MiileHiCon, too.)
(As a bunch of people have said) I’m pretty sure The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet isn’t eligible, but the author ought to be eligible for the Campbell.
This was a comment from yesterday, but since it was stuck in moderation for awhile and people may have missed it: Kickstarter’s that may be of interest.
@Mike Glyer
On the plus side, this proves that at least one Puppy knows how the voting system works! Very exciting. Hopefully he’ll explain it to all the others at some point.
@Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
Great comment. 🙂
@NickPheas
Sorry, Amazon is slim pickings today! Hardly anything worth mentioning. Assuming Amazon isn’t hiding things again.
Made to Kill isn’t reduced, but it is a good price and it does look rather interesting.
Most people don’t know much about the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I’ve interacted for years with a couple of them, mostly on the subject of religion, and in my opinion the fact that Gygax was a Witness is highly unlikely to have strongly influenced D&D. Someone above suggested that the fact that clerics are the healers was significant, but a) JWs don’t have any kind of ordained separate clergy, not even as much as the Mormons, who do have non-clergy adult members, AKA “women”, and b) JWs do believe in the use of lots of modern medicine, just not blood transfusions. (Although they did actively support blood transfusions as recently as 1945.)
And honestly, if you wanted to look for a religion in which clerics and healers went together then the catholic nursing tradition would seem a more sensible place to start.
(1) All hail Red Wombat!
(2) Ursula Le Guin is awesome and I wish I could sic her on every fantasy-scorning English lit teacher I ever had.
(3) Reminds me that I should read the original Russ work.
(12) For the millionth and a half time: everyone calling “No Award” a bloc clearly doesn’t know what bloc voting is, and none of the people voting No Award consider the Hugos to have been “wrecked” by that choice, because, duh, their choice won, so they actually feel pretty good about it.
However, the grotesque ugliness of that statue appears to be intended to make somebody feel bad. Is it to make sure that the people who didn’t win Hugos feel as horrible as Ken Burnside clearly thinks they ought to feel? Or is it to make us, the evil fen who no-awarded them, feel bad, because we could have given them a shiny rocket, and instead they got a turd in an ashtray?
Also, as a writer who has never won a Hugo myself, I’m extremely unsympathetic to the idea that not winning a Hugo is somehow the greatest insult a person could possibly endure. Without the puppy campaigns, Mr. Burnside’s work would almost certainly not have been on the ballot at all — which, curiously enough, also does not result in winning a Hugo.
You know, for SP4, if I were actually a fan of any of these people, I would probably campaign for not trying to get them on the ballot at all, because clearly getting on the ballot and not winning is far worse for them than never getting nominated in the first place.
(14) I’m thinking “Gus” has simply never read any of the books he mentions as being “pure entertainment” because if he had, he would know that Frankenstein is, in part, a lengthy lecture from the creature himself about how being treated as a monster turned him into a monster, and that Gulliver’s Travels is a deeply cynical satirical critique of human society.
It is a bit hilarious that the anti-intellectual crew can be every bit as self-righteous and belligerent as the fantasy-hating lit snobs referenced in (2). I kind of want to wind them up and sic them on each other.
(16) Diana Rigg is the best.
(19) All the people in that photo are the best.
I am squeeing with delight over the Ursula Vernon news.
Congrats, RedWombat!
Speaking of Becky Chambers, I really liked Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (though, like others, I don’t consider it quite hugoworthy), and I would like to read more stuff like that. She mentions on her website that she is working on a companion novel, and I will definitely read that when it is available.
@C A Collins:
Reminds me of a Facebook meme I saw recently that hit the point really well:
Congratulations, RedWombat! I do not wish to count your chickens before they are hatched, so should it make its way onto the screen, and then across the Pond, I promise that I will borrow someone’s offspring and treat said offspring to a trip to the cinema.
Anna
Hear hear!
Warning: tl;dr ahead in my response to LeGuin’s essay, particularly this part:
LeGuin: American critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury one of the great works of twentieth-century fiction, The Lord of the Rings. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it, because they’re afraid of it. They’re afraid of dragons. They know if they acknowledge Tolkien they’ll have to admit that fantasy can be literature, and that therefore they’ll have to redefine what literature is.
Do some “American critics and academics” try to bury Tolkien?
Sure!
I’m defining “critics” as a huge group of writers who publish reviews and commentary in a range of periodicals from the New York Times Review of Science Fiction (ahem started by Gerald Jonas who strikes me as an American critics to the sff magazines to internet commentary at blogs (Natalie Luhrs being one of my FAVORITE bloggers).
Note that forty years ago, “critics” would have been a much smaller, much maler, much straighter, much whiter, much more “professional” (in the sense of gatekeeping) group that now.
That is, “critics” means everybody who publishes commentary on Tolkien and sff (I’m extending my points to sff because I think that it’s all part of one major paradigm shift in U.S. culture and academia) who isn’t an academic publishing in a peer-reviewed journal or through a university press. Thus, academics are a sub-set of “critics.”
News flash: they failed.
Secondary news flash: critics and academics tried even harder in the United Kingdom to bury Tolkien but even there, they failed.
It didn’t matter how AWFUL Edmund Wilson found Tolkien’s Orcs.
They failed in every possible way.
Not only is Tolkien’s popularity greater than ever (and we’re talking a global popularity fueled by translations in numerous languages and by Peter Jackson’s live-action film adaptation (no matter how horrendous some critics and academics find the films—and a lot of their language ironically mirrors the anti-Tolkien criticism of the 1950s in dismissing them as “boys’ adventure/action stories”), the films have expanded Tolkien’s readership, led directly to Tolkien’s work being taught in more schools and universities, and to more scholarship being written on Tolkien by academics.
The numbers I’m going to give below are from the Modern Languages International Bibliography. The Modern Languages Association is the oldest and largest professional organization of literature and languages academics in the English-speaking world (I suspect world-wide, but I don’t know for sure!).
It is certainly a good example, overall, to support LeGuin’s claims about academic marginalizing of genre literature (science fiction, Tolkien, romance, westerns, mysteries, etc.). But the Bibliography is one of the most comprehensive of scholarship published in academic journals (and in recent years non-academic journals are included as well), so it’s a good place to mine for data showing changes.
So. “Tolkien” subject search done November 4, 2015.
Results: 2,419 (meaning books, anthology chapters, articles, and dissertations).
The first three articles published in 1952 and 1953 talk about his work on Beowulf. Tolkien’s essay “The Monsters and the Critics” was the foundation of entire literary sub-field of Beowulf studies, as opposed to it being solely a focus for philological scholarship on Anglo Saxon language issues. (And I would argue as well from a lot of years hanging out with medievalists, who were the majority of academics to write about Tolkien’s novels, his arguments about the poem as a LITERARY work are also strongly connected to the foundation of Tolkien studies).
But of course that was before LotR was published. Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit covers a lot of the celebratory critical commentary and articles when the book was first published.
Arguably, TH was less controversial than LotR because it was presented as a “children’s story” which fit the cultural stereotypes of the time, i.e. “fantasy” was OK for children, because children. Tolkien tackled those stereotypes in his essay “On Fairy Stories” which has been much studies and used by (wait for it) academics writing on Tolkien’s work. The negative criticisms of LotR, exemplified by Wilson, seemed mostly incensed by the idea that actual adults, including people like C. S. Lewis and W. H. Auden were taking this “childish” story by this weird Oxford don *seriously* as adult literature. LeGuin isn’t wrong that a lot of critics and academics want to dismiss Tolkien: what leaves me frustrated by her comments is that she completely glosses over and ignores the forty or more years during which *some* academics and critics have been resisting that tendency.
The first article published on Tolkien’s work is not necessarily a positive one. thus it is part of the “let’s bury him” strategy.
Although I will note that publishing essays on an author is not exactly the best way to “bury” his work not in academia which has a lot of people who read an essay they disagree with and voila WRITE an essay arguing with it!
The text below is copied from the MLA Bibliography and is in the format they give (true for all the entries taken from that source):
Ethical Pattern in The Lord of the Rings
By: Spacks, Patricia Meyer; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 1959; 3 (1): 30-42. (journal article)
The most recent publication indexed in the MLA Bibliography is:
A Song for J. R. R. Tolkien
Full Text Available By: Parman, Sue; Antioch Review, 2015 Winter; 73 (1): 34-44. (journal article)
Subjects: letters; memoir
Let’s do a quick chronological breakdown, speaking of “40 years” of ignoring Tolkien.
If I limit the search for publications on Tolkien’s work to only those publications appearing during the years 1950-1975 (the final date being chosen because it was 40 years ago) on Tolkien, I get:
177 publications during those in 25 years
I’ve read quite a few of them, and there are some interesting patterns to discuss, including the fact that the earliest academic anthologies on Tolkien’s work tended to try to “dismiss the fans,” and explain how Tolkien’s work was really GOOD despite its popularity, and to hope that the popularity diminished so “real” scholarship could be done.
So clearly those early academics’ hopes that popularity would diminish have failed miserably!
A subject search on Tolkien criticism and scholarship from 1976-2015:
2,242 results (these include periodical articles, peer-reviewed articles, anthology chapters, books by single authors, and dissertations in the United States at least).
I’d say the last forty years shows a spirited attempt by scholars and critics in multiple disciplinary areas to *bring Tolkien into the canon of literary works.*
By canon, I mean those works that are discussed by academics and critics, in a variety of cultural spaces, including peer-reviewed journals, and those works that are taught in schools.
And my focus here excludes the immense amount of fan scholarship that exists on Tolkien, a fan scholarship that is still pretty much ignored by academic scholars.
However, since a number of the “second generation” of Tolkien scholars, including myself identify as fans, at least we’re not all still routinely dissing fans. I say “second generation” because the “first generation” consists of those academics that created Tolkien Studies by publishing, teaching, and organizing sessions at conferences.
The biggest names of the first generation are: Jane Chance, Verlyn Flieger, and Tom Shippey, all academics. All still alive (though all recently retired). And the fact that two of the three biggest academic names in the field are women is fairly unique (outside fields such as feminist studies and women’s literature!)
And collections of scholarship in honor of their work on Tolkien are published/being published.
And the teaching issue (often ignored by many who aren’t, well, teachers) is important as well. Tolkien’s work was first taught in U. S. colleges as part of the changes during the 1970s (not because of a great sea-change in which everyone realized that omg it’s LITERATURE, but because it attracted students into classes). The process of canonization includes teaching of the works, especialkly at the college and graduate level (and warning: the “canon” changes constantly).
[There was a huge drop-off of students majoring in humanities courses during the 1970s which has been debated for years. George Will and Harold Bloom and Allen Bloom and all their Puppy Ilk have attributed this drop-off to the fact that the hippies and marxists who failed during the 1960s to overthrow the white Amerikan Western Civilization took over the universities to indoctrinate the young by throwing out Shakespeare and teaching Alice Walker, aka THEORY and SJWs. In fact, recent intriguing research shows that one reason that the numbers changed was the impact of the feminist movement that opened up degrees in male-dominated programs to women in the United States: The changing majors of women. Certainly it’s true that the progressive and activist movements had an impact on academia during the 1970s, with the growth of women’s studies, Afro-American studies, multicultural and ethnic studies, etc., that continued to the present day. In any case, the first courses on Tolkien were taught during the 1970s, though some research I was doing in the Marquette Tolkien Archive indicates there were some earlier English faculty in the U.S. involved in a variety of Tolkien courses and publications that aren’t always known about today.]
Tolkien still won’t be found routinely in most “canonical” courses such as “British surveys” necessarily, or in “Modern British Literature” necessarily, and is still often taught under special topic rubrics (meaning not official courses), but even that is changing.
The Modern Languages Association itself has just published (about eight years in the making, sigh) a book on teaching Tolkien in its “Approaches to Teaching World Literature: edited by Leslie Donovan.
Leslie has also set up an online journal for teachers (at all grade levels and in all disciplines) to post about how they teach Tolkien.
Short message: there’s a whole lot of people teaching Tolkien all over the U. S. educational system from grade school to graduate school. And the more we teach it, the more it will be taught. (I teach Tolkien under the special topics number in my department, though I can occasionally sneak his work in, or Pratchett’s in a couple of memorable summer terms under a regular course titled “Major British Writers” that allows for a wide range of topics to be taught.)
And “Tolkien Studies” is growing as an academic sub-field: it’s still challenged by many, still controversial, but it’s growing.
I wish that LeGuin could acknowledge that because her points, while absolutely accurate when The Language of the Night was published in 1978, are part of the change I’m talking about here.
Doing subject searches on “LeGuin” in the MLA Bibliography shows 521 results (articles, peer-reviewed articles, books, anthologies, and dissertations).
The earliest one appeared in 1972:
‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ and the Charge of Escapism
Detail Only Available By: Jago, Wendy; Children’s Literature in Education: An International Quarterly, 1972 July; 3 (2): 21-29. (journal article)
Subjects: children; naming; choice; morality
Yes, it was in the children’s literature area (but let’s think a moment about how people still dismiss “children’s literature”—and nowadays “YA literature” as not real literature even though both these areas are ones that have been most welcoming to sff related works—probably because of their own marginal status—and it’s not completely coincidental that these academic fields are dominated by women and have been since the start—since women (primarily white because of institutional racism in the U. S. academy) don’t have any major cultural capital or status, what the hell, we can do all the weird stuff if we want), but it was there.
And the newest publications: the most recent three, all appearing in 2015, are dissertations. The fact that they’re dissertations is a major thing: one usually publishes from one’s dissertation in the first few years of academic employment, and if these topics are approved, it means that graduate academics are “approving” topics in the marginalized areas. Also note the topics related to the dissertations and the universities:
Spectacles of Faith: Technology, Religion, and Modern American Fictions
Detail Only Available By: Hamner, Everett Lance; Dissertation Abstracts International, 2015 Nov; 76 (5). U of Iowa, 2008 (dissertation abstract)
Subjects: Ellison, Ralph; Percy, Walker; Le Guin, Ursula K.; film; technology; religion
Let’s Just Steal the Rockets: 1970s Feminist Science Fiction as Radical Rhetorical Revisioning
Detail Only Available By: Belk, Patrick Nolan; Dissertation Abstracts International, 2015 Aug; 76 (2). U of North Carolina, Greensboro, 2014 (dissertation abstract)
Subjects: 1970-1979; utopia; social justice; feminism
Balancing Flux and Stability: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed
Detail Only Available By: Jones, Hillary A.; Dissertation Abstracts International, 2015 Feb; 75 (8). Pennsylvania State U, 2011 (dissertation abstract)
Subjects: paradox; rhetoric; anarchism
Besides the work on Le Guin’s fiction, there are 30 articles by LeGuin herself as a critic and author and editor!
Just as Tolkien wrote fiction AND criticism AND theory, so too does LeGuin.
That’s why I say she’s part of the solution to the problem she is writing about!
And as I noted above, I also strongly associated the status of Tolkien’s work in criticism and the academy with “science fiction” (though arguably at the start, during the 1970s, there was a bit more credibility given to “hard” science fiction over fantasy—but of course the field of “science fiction,” or “speculative fiction” as I prefer has changed as well!). Certainly when I was in fandom during the 1970s, we didn’t distinguish that much between the genres.
(And when I was active in fandom, I was also an English major in a department where there was ONE “Science Fiction as Literature course,” and then going on to my graduate work, and eventually getting my doctorate with a dissertation that incorporated feminist theory and Foucault and science fiction—I was an SF fan before I became an English major, and I got a Ph.D. so I could bring sf—by women!—into the academy. A lot of us did. THINGS CHANGED.)
“Science fiction” subject search in MLA: 11,673 hits
Lunar Characters in Science and Fiction
By: Parsons, Coleman O.; Notes and Queries, 1933; 164: 346-348. (journal article)
1933. *ahem*
Remembering and Restoring the Republic: Star Wars and Rome
Full Text Available By: Charles, Michael B.; Classical World, 2015 Winter; 108 (2): 281-298. (journal article)
Subjects: science fiction film; Star Wars film series; freedom; oppression; Roman Empire
What a lot of book fans/academics didn’t predict was the growth of “science fiction” as a mainstream cultural product through films and games (and having hung out at the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts where some of the *founders* of science fiction literary studies do, I’m say to say a lot of them are grumpy about it and complain about young people these days not reading the classics….)
It’s a bit harder to track “fantasy” scholarship because the term “fantasy” refers to a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with “genre fantasy” (darn psychology!). But a few searches of related terms:
Genre fantasy 605
Fantastic literature 261
Dystopias 1,016
Utopia 5,707
A lot of “fantasy” might get subsumed under “science fiction” tags in databases.
There are entire academic journals dedicated entirely to science fiction and fantasy:
Foundation
Journal of Science Fiction Studies (founded in 1973 one might note!)
Extrapolation
MythLore (Started as a FANZINE, so fan scholarship became peer-reviewed scholarship!)
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
And, finally, TWO journals dedicated to Tolkien’s work alone:
Tolkien Studies
And online, open-access, Journal of Tolkien Research
And, finally, one of the reasons that LeGuin’s ongoing dismissal of “academics and critics” bugs me the most is because it wipes out all the work done by women sff fans, critics, and academics (of which she is one! And she knows about WisCon, and Broad Universe, and The Tiptree Award, who are all full of critics and academics working to build awareness of sff.
Laura Quilter has been doing amazing work on the internet for years, and there are so many others, writing criticism in many different internet publications and spaces.
There’s even an Encyclopedia of Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy!
And let’s not forget three major intellectual/cultural histories on women and sff that I have to recommend All. The. Time.
Justine Larbalestier’s The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction
Helen Merrick’s The Secret Feminist Cabal
Lisa Yaszek’s Galactic Suburbs
It’s good to keep calling out the sad dinosaurs that are resisting the changes of the past fifty plus years, but it would be nice if LeGuin, with the size of her audience, spent a little time focusing on all the critics and academics, especially the women, who are creating the changes she is calling for.
Her ongoing unawareness of the critical and academic efforts (if she has spent time writing about these efforts, I apologize for not having seen it and would love the links doing) is getting increasingly frustrating.
Many congratulations, kudos, and accolades to RedWombat! ^_^ It may only be an option, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it becomes reality!
Regarding the phallus-crashed-in-turd… this is extremely disheartening. I’ve been on the SFConSim-L list for many years and have always appreciated Burnside’s work — his work on a playable 3D-movement hard-science space combat miniatures game is top notch. Charles Oines does great 3D work and his game Voidstriker is really well-done and one of the best build-some-ships-make-them-fight systems I’ve seen. So it’s depressing to see their names connected to the morass that is the aftermath of this year’s Sad/Rabid puppies.
Grocery shopping today. This may drive me to get the mint chocolate chip ice cream which is horrible for me but comfortably numbing. 🙁
A quicky note — long link laden essay in response to Le Guin’s points in her essay is in moderation!
And:
Congratulations to Red Wombat on the OPTIONING! I would so watch an adaptation of Castle Hangnail which I love.
ANd Ellen DeGeneres! AMAZING stuff she’s doing.
Will add my Red Wombat congratulations. Wombatulations. Whatever.
Ken Marable’s thing on WordPress where he asks for discussion of potential Hugo nominees has started running. I’ve stuck in three short puff pieces for various semiprozines and plan to add more, myself. It would be nice if lots and lots of people sent in many and varied recommendations so that it has not even the slightest appearance of an organized slate. Off to read more zines, now.